K9 Officer Rescues Lost Non-Verbal Child by Following the Boy’s Scent in Reverse to Find His Home

July 25, 2024 journo

Monroe County Sheriff’s Office – Facebook

In North Carolina, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office received a call that a child was wandering alone on the road on July 7th.

Dispatching an officer to the Waxhaw Indian Trail Road, the child was located and secured, but being autistic and non-verbal, the officer had no idea where the boy had wandered away from.

Being that the responder was a K-9 Unit, and was working alongside his trusty 1-year-old bloodhound Remi, Deputy B. Belk utilized the dog’s incredible sense of smell to “reverse” the normal scent tracking process to find the boy’s home.

“Normally, [scent dogs] track from where a person left to try to find where that person is currently. This time we were doing it reverse,” said Lieutenant Public Information Officer James Maye to CNN.

“As many of our followers know, bloodhounds use scent articles to track. To obtain a scent article that would help identify the child’s home, Deputy Belk used a piece of sterile gauze to collect the scent from his forearms and the back of his neck,” a statement from the Sheriff’s Office said.

“The scent article was given to Remi, who then successfully tracked backwards for approximately a half mile before locating the child’s home in a nearby neighborhood.”

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When arriving, Deputy Belk found the garage door ajar and determined that the child left in a secretive manner and that no negligence of a criminal level had taken place. The parents were understandably grateful to see their son and Belk, who offered a series of “tips” on how to prevent such things from happening again.

Lieutenet Maye explained the technique of reverse tracking would now be implemented in the training curriculum for K-9 officers.

“I’ve been around for 10 or 12 years. I’ve never heard anything like this being done. It’s not something that these guys train on normally, but it is something they’re going to instill in training from here on out,” Maye said.

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